While the Jeep and Burger King Twitter hijacks were hilarious to
many, such incidents can seriously harm a brand's relationship
with its customers by showing that brand managers don't value the
direct connections social media provides.

"If the decision makers don't use [social media] themselves, they
might not understand the extent of its reach," Golaszewska said.
"They don't always realize that even a deleted post can live
forever in screen shots."

Dismissive attitudes toward social media can lead to lax
social-media security as well. High turnover and unclear
social-media policies may result in many former interns and
employees who still have keys to a company's social-media
platforms.

No one has ever died from a hacked Twitter account or a
disgruntled intern's rant on the corporate Facebook profile, but
that doesn't mean these incidents don't have real-life
consequences.

In the past couple of years, household names such as KitchenAid,
Chrysler, Microsoft, Marc Jacobs and StubHub have had their
Twitter accounts abused by employees who thought they were
tweeting on their own personal accounts, or who used the
corporate account to send offensive or brand-damaging messages to
a larger audience.

It's not just companies that are at risk. Several celebrities,
including
Ashton Kutcher, Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears have had their
accounts taken over by hackers who suddenly find themselves with
an unearned audience of millions.

So how can an individual or company protect a Twitter account?

"In addition to creating a strong password, be sure to change
your password often and always change it after someone leaves the
company," said Rebecca Debono, social-media strategist at San
Diego digital-marketing agency Digitaria. "You never know where
former employees place old documents online or how easy their
accounts are to hack."

"I always say to my clients, if you can remember your password,
it is not cryptic enough," San Diego social-media expert and
consultant Mari Smith told TechNewsDaily. "People need to do
their homework and find a reliable system that stores passwords and
gets them out of the habit of committing passwords to memory."

Smith recommends social-media scheduling tools such as HootSuite,
which enables multiple people to tweet or post updates on a
single account but doesn't allow users to make profile changes.

Smith pointed out that if Twitter offered two-step authentication
and strongly encouraged users — especially high-profile
celebrities and brands — to enable it, account hijacks such as
these would happen with less frequency.

(Twitter has said it is looking into adding two-step
authentication, which would require users to log in with a
password and a separate factor, such as a code text-messaged to a
mobile phone.)

In that case, hackers exploited a flaw in Oracle's Java browser
plug-in to break into Twitter's employee network. (Twitter
subsequently changed the passwords of all affected users.)

There's no panacea that will solve the complex security problems
of navigating the corporate world on social media.

But companies may be doing themselves a disservice if they treat
social media as a second-rate medium for communicating with their
customers. As with any other customer-facing aspect of a
business, image and control is everything.